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My opinion is right for me, but it may not be right for you. But your opinion would be useful.
The Windows Form Designer, from the VB days to Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Framework 4.8 is an amazingly productive tool. The time it takes to build a window like I want, create to the code skeleton for events, etc. is drastically reduced from hand-coding. Thus, in a given amount of project time, I now have more time to spend improving the project, doing more testing, or even adding features. Those things would not be possible without the Designer.
Now, consider XAML Forms and HTML pages for Blazor. No designer. Even a Windows Forms designer in .NET Core 3.0 is missing, for now. Adding those designers would have the same effects for those environments and productivity that the Forms Designer did for VB and Visual Studio.
Microsoft's team of millennials and Gen-Z'ers appear to not have the depth of experience, or concepts of value engineering, to know why a GUI designer is so valuable.
That said, what are your opinions of how important it is to have Xamarin XAML and Blazor HTML designers on a par with the .NET Framework Windows Forms Designer?
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MSBassSinger wrote: HTML designers
Years ago I stopped doing web forms in Design mode because it didn't do a good job generating the html.
But generally speaking, yes, I think the designer can make things much quicker.
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Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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Pretty much won't touch Xamarin XAML because of the lack of a designer. Won't touch WPF because it lacks a usable designer. While I'm stuck with HTML, tools that let you do side-by-side HTML with preview mitigate the pain.
And yes, very important. I remember when I came out with MyXaml and almost everyone (some rather nastily) said they'd never use a UI generator where you had to edit the "markup" by hand.
And guess where we are now? And guess what camp I'm in when it comes lack of designers. 
That said, if I can avoid having to even touch HTML, the happier I am. I don't mind writing HTML generators (usually client-side on the fly) that create the HTML from some metadata format. But that's me.
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Marc Clifton wrote: Won't touch WPF because it lacks a usable designer
For what it's worth Marc, it's not that hard. I've been doing WPF UI's for over ten years now. WPF 'design' in XAML lends itself well to a top-down, organization first then detail approach.
Software Zen: delete this;
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of the three UI's supported by dotnet; my level of productivity is quickest with Winforms, followed by UWP, and lastly is WPF. WPF for me is just not as "discoverable" as the other two formats, even when using Blend.
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Matt McGuire wrote: Blend
I've never been able to use Blend. It only has a "dark" user interface (even the so-called light theme is gray over darker gray) and is unusable to my middle-aged vision.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I use the XAML designer with WPF, but only to see what the resulting layout is. I do the XAML by hand as I don't like some of the things the designer does when using it's ability to drag and drop or move things around.
It would be nice if VSCode had a visual designer, I think it would make the process quicker.
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I agree, the designer is nice to see how your product is building but had issues in the old asp.net days with it doing some weird things in the raw html.
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As someone who once used FrontPage[^] and Visual InterDev 97[^], all I can say with regards to WSYWIG HTML editors is: never again.
They make it really easy to design things that work on your precise screen resolution, which then fall apart the moment someone resizes the browser window by 10px.
The same thing applied to the WPF designed the last time I tried that.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: The same thing applied to the WPF designed the last time I tried that.
Which is why I do the XAML by hand, but use the designer to see how it would look like.
The problem with that specific designer is that it creates absolute layouts, instead of relative.
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MSBassSinger wrote: The Windows Form Designer, from the VB days to Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Framework 4.8 is an amazingly productive tool. The time it takes to build a window like I want, create to the code skeleton for events, etc. is drastically reduced from hand-coding.
Long time WinForm user here, and I'm quicker without the designer. "Click, go to properties, undock, move, paste in new panel, redock".
Also seen to many people draw dialogs, with a panel docked to the bottom, containing a panel docked to the right, containing two buttons returning either DialogResult.OK or DialogResult.Cancel. Forms do support inheritance, so you code it once and stop drawing. Has the added advantage that when you want to change the dialogs to have menu's instead of buttons (or whatever), you simply change the base.
So, it may seem a productivity-booster, and it is - for quick and dirty prototyping.
Similarly, you can use databinding from the designer and create working applications. The drawback is that your form doesn't update during processing - so I'll be writing code to do so on a backgroundworker, giving feedback to the user with a progressbar. No databinding here 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I personally avoid those that don't have the designers. Sometimes I cannot remember how to do something or I want quick and dirty. Those designers work wonderfully for each of those things. I can visually "draw" it on the screen and then go look and see how it was built. It ends up being faster than the same google search. I am probably in the minority though.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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The WinForms designer is not without faults (derive a control from an abstract UserControl base and start swearing for example) but by heck it makes life easier!
That's one of the things that - still - makes WPF feel "unfinished" and somewhat amateur to me. If you can do it for C# code, why the heck not do it for more organised and structured XML?
I was looking forward to Blazor but you do need a good designer to give you a WYSWYG "starter" or you waste too much effort before you can start to work on the actual "working stuff".
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: That's one of the things that - still - makes WPF feel "unfinished" and somewhat amateur to me. If you can do it for C# code, why the heck not do it for more organised and structured XML?
Have you looked at the crappy XML based designer for SSRS. Access was far more powerful and easy to use. This is probably why MS hasn't built a decent designer for XML based UIs.
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I thought all my birthdays had come at once, when I started using the VS.NET designer. Writing UI code to cope with resizing, docking and so on used to drive me mad.
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Quote: Microsoft's team of millennials and Gen-Z'ers appear to not have the depth of experience, or concepts of value engineering, to know why a GUI designer is so valuable.
There is a lot of regression taking place all over Microsoft's products (think also for most of the other IT companies). It comes from these same people. They are all self centered in addition to what you have observed, and as a result have no clue how people are actually using their software.
Email is a prime example. The usability is degrading due to Fort Knox security requirement they impose on everything regardless if the user needs it.
Cannot travel anywhere away from my office to trigger a whole series concerned emails and requirements to keep using my email. Try traveling outside of the country then it gets even worse reaching a point where I just not use email because it is too much of a hassle.
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Interesting discussion. The reason it interests me is that for the last 20 years I have been developing GUI tools for a niche market (Powerbasic) and one of the things I built which it lacked was a Visual Designer. Visual Designers are not easy to build. I spent 20 years writing my own GUI framework (WIN32) with a Visual Designer engine built into it and when I looked for information about how to write a drag and drop engine specific to programming Visual Designers, there simply wasn't any. There are no native high level API's in the Windows WIN32 for this. Many indie programming languages have come into existence over the years, some hobby languages, others professional level, but the one thing they often lack is a decent Form designer. The reason is that it is not easy to build one.
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If it were easy, everyone could do it.
The fact that the MS VB team did it in the late 1980s, and re-writing the VB IDE in assembler no less, shows that the right folks on the right team with the right leadership and vision can do that which is "not easy".
Why has MS failed to hire that caliber of developers, testers, and leadership for UI tooling in Visual Studio?
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Long time WinForms coder here, and before that, C++/MFC for many years. I dont use the designer in web apps much, except to add a control in general and then I go to the code. In WinForms, the designer is a huge time saver IMO, even though sometimes it gets confused and I have to drop into the generated code and fix things. In VC++, and I go back to version 1.52 (and before that, yes, I'm old), the designer was much less useful, but it still did a lot of work for you. Use bare XML to do a form layout? No, I'd rather not.
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I completely agree with your assessments regarding the Windows Forms Designer.
However, I have been developing with WPF(XAML) for quite a while now so I have seen the changes in the WPF Forms Designer over the years.
And it is still as bad as it always has been since very little of it makes any sense from a visual perspective.
Using the WPF Designer appears to work the same as the old Java forms designers, which I found to be completely useless.
As a result, I simply use the XAML Markup Editor that is tied to a WPF window or Page...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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In general, drag and drop, point and click is easier to use and approach. But.... with something like WPF, coordinates can be specified in terms of relative or absolute, and the organization of your containers and how they're setup is relevant too. It doesn't lend itself to a drag and drop approach. You can drag a window and drop it somewhere, and there are several ways the designer could format the code and it can't guess what you actually want. Only you know that. I've only used it a little bit, but I found the xaml editor more helpful. It reminded me of webforms, speaking of which, I never use the designer for web forms. I'm terrible with making pretty web forms, so I just create the elements I need, get it functional and pass it off to our web designer guy who does CSS against everything. He too, hates the designer because it gives you no idea at all what your page is going to actually look like. With Win32 API the designer makes sense, all coordinates are absolute so there is only 1 answer when it comes time to using the code. But even here, I put everything in table or flow layout panels and use those to control the layout logic. I never let anything just sit in a parent container, many of our applications are language translated and having things sit in absolute coordinates is a recipe for disaster.
And given that designers are easier if you're lazy, I would think millenials would be all about making them a top priority. I doubt the lack of a designer is because of millenials.
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You do know that Windows Forms has been doing relative or absolute for quite a while? Including docking options for UI components.
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A little history about WIN32 and scalable coordinates. in the Windows 3.1 days, the WIN API used dialog units which were scalable. Dialogs units with old Windows worked well, since they scaled to the system font and a dialog unit came out exactly 2 pixels in most instances on most displays. When WIN32 came along, so did many larger displays and dialog units didn't always scale properly and didn't come out exactly to pixels, but a percentage of a pixels. This would cause forms designed using the Windows Dialog Designer (aka. very old school designer dating back to Windows 3.1 and coding in pure C) to shift a pixel or two and things often didn't line up properly on some systems.
As a long time WIN32 programmer I saw the pros and cons to dialog units. So when I started writing my own GUI framework based on the WIN32, I choose a different route. Dialog units are actually based on a character unit. Dialog Base Units as they are called are the average width and height of the system font. The system font in Windows 3.1 days was a fixed width and came out to 8 x 16 pixels. A dialog unit was defined as (dialog base unit width / 4) and (dialog base unit height / 8). So 8 / 4 = 2 pixels width and 16 / 8 = 2 pixels height.
So dialog units came out exactly as 2 x 2 pixels.
But later on with WIN32 windows could scale the system fonts and on different displays the dialog base unit did not come out exactly 8 x 16 pixels. Now you had a problem when scaling.
I liked how Dialog units worked, but they were flawed when scaled. So I decided a different route. Why not define a dialog base unit in a similar way by getting the average the current system font (even variable width) to define an internal character unit size. But instead of defining coordinates using whole numbers like dialog units do, why not defined character units using floating point. This would provide pin-point accuracy. You could define a coordinate using decimals, like 1.75 horizontal character unit and 2.5 vertical character units.
No matter how the end users system defined the font scaling, you would pixel accurate positioning. I actually did this in a GUI framework and surprise, it works amazingly well.
By building a Visual Designer using character based units which are floating point, you can get very accurate scaling for any system. Just have the GUI framework convert internally the character units to what ever units you desire and at any scaling.
Now add to this your own auto-resize engine (for when forms are resized at run time by the user) for forms and controls and then you have a much easier system for scaling and it works well even with the WIN32, which was not designed well for handling such things like later GUI frameworks in Windows did.
I know it works well, since I have already done this in my own GUI framework and it is WIN32 based. For those who build Visual Designers, why not trying using this approach so the Designer uses its own character unit with floating point and you likely could have it scale to almost any other GUI framework you desire to support.
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Yes I know the Dock and Anchor options, but I can't do something like say the width of my text box is 80%.
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Sure you can. You can add code in an event, or size it for 80% of the design window, and let it auto size after that. I’ve done that in my WinForms apps. Just think through what tools are in your toolbox and use them.
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